EVENTS

Trouble for Chris Christie

New Jersey governor Chris Christie clearly has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2016. It is also clear that he is pushing the ‘maverick’ shtick that worked for John McCain, at least as far as getting the Republican nomination was concerned, and to aim for the support of the party establishment, territory that is open since all the other putative candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Crux, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry) seem to be angling for the Tea Party wing’s support. He clearly wants to be portrayed as the straight-talking, no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, not-totally-nuts kind of guy.

But a new book on the 2012 presidential race, one of those post-election insider gossip fests so beloved by the Washington beltway class, could prove highly damaging to his chances. In the chapter about Mitt Romney’s search for a running mate, a process dubbed Project Goldfish, the authors dwell on the vetting of Christie and the damaging information that was found in terms of his personality, temperament, health, habits, past actions, and ethics.

Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under [Beth] Myers, had come into the vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty.

If the Romney camp felt that they could destroy Christie, then it seems unlikely that he could survive against the Tea Party gang. All Christie’s negatives are still there and may make the party establishment wary about putting their support behind such a risky choice and if Christie does not get their full backing, he has no chance.

Because the Romney campaign’s servers were under continual assault by Chinese hackers, the computers in the clean room were not connected to the Internet.

Probably didn’t stop the NSA.

Myers insisted that the team be extremely cautious about what they put in e-mail when using their regular computers. Ted Newton and Chris Oman, two veep background checkers, concluded it was best to communicate in code. Based on their junk-food-saturated vetting diet, they called their undertaking Project Goldfish (after the crackers)—ultimately giving each of the VP finalists an aquatic code name.

…Within a month, the vetters had assembled preliminary research books on the 11, which Romney perused and then rendered his short list: Christie (Pufferfish), Pawlenty (Lakefish), Portman (Filet o Fish), Rubio (Pescado) and Ryan (Fishconsin).

Not exactly Enigma, is it.

Punctuality mattered to Romney. Christie’s lateness bugged him. Mitt also cared about fitness and was prone to poke fun at those who didn’t. (“Oh, there’s your date for tonight,” he would say to male members of his traveling crew when they spied a chunky lady on the street.) Romney marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down the narrow aisle of the campaign bus. Watching a video of Christie without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, “Guys! Look at that!”

Punctuality mattered to Romney. Christie’s lateness bugged him. Mitt also cared about fitness and was prone to poke fun at those who didn’t. (“Oh, there’s your date for tonight,” he would say to male members of his traveling crew when they spied a chunky lady on the street.) Romney marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down the narrow aisle of the campaign bus. Watching a video of Christie without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, “Guys! Look at that!”

Demonstrates what a yellow bellied, sociopathic piece of filth Rmoney is. Nothing at all like his dad who was a stand up guy.

So Romney didn’t like Christie because Christie wasn’t punctual and Christie was fat. I didn’t like Romney because he was a right wing asshole who showed his utter contempt for any American not worth a couple of million dollars. I think my dislike of Romney is more rational than his dislike of Christie.

I would take this with a Very Large grain of salt. These same clowns thought the polls were “skewed” and seem to have believed, until after the voting finished, that Rmoney would win, possibly by a landside. They showed no obvious connect to Reality, be it in voter’s intentions or much of anything else, and dismissed or ignored (or, perhaps, where so incurious they didn’t even check?) evidence to the contrary and plausible alternatives. They seemed to live in an impervious echo-chamber.

Oh come on Prof. Singham, Cain, Santorum, and Gingrich were serious contenders only in the imagination of the lame stream media who built up each one of them in turn to sell newspapers and TV commercials. This is what the media does, if Rmoney had sewed up the nomination early on, no story for the talking heads and editorial writers to pontificate on.

Honestly, the best thing that can happen to the Democrats for 2016 is for the GOP to move even farther right in 2014. I’m hoping we see the democrats win a few more seats in congress, though not all of them, and that as many republicans as possible get replaced by Tea Party primary challengers. Keep them contained but on display and 2016 wins itself. For best results, bait them into one more fiasco in early 2016. Obama should stand up for Social Security and try to actually keep it solvent for he next 50-100 years.

I think the Republicans could -and no doubt will – do a lot worse than Chris Christie.

From what I gather, he’s one of the more reasonable and intelligent ones on that side of politics.

Which probably means he’s got no chance of scoring the Repub nomination although things may be changing and swinging back towards sanity and the political centre there – they have to at some point, right?